Comments for an Analysis of The Shining – 8 am

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Juli Kearns

Juli Kearns is the author of Thunderbird and the Ball of Twine and Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World (or) In Search of the Great Penguin. She is also an artist/photographer, and the person behind the web alter of "Idyllopus Press".
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Jack dies from a concussion — see Natasha Richardson’s death — while he’s in the storage room. (Wendy killed him, protecting herself from non-lethal but threatening domestic abuse.) Note he is “asleep” almost 8 hours — seriously? No — he died … but doesn’t know it. Prior to this he has not actually done anything worse (he did not strangle Danny) than being a threatening, obnoxious jerk who is a fake, pretending to write all day while producing nothing. Afterwords, he doesn’t realize he’s dead yet — he can walk through walls (thinking it’s Grady who “opens” the door), something that would’ve helped him in the maze if he’d known. Because he is still in an in-between state, he can wield an axe. He does what the hotel REALLY wants him to do: kill Halloran, who has been the skunk at the party. (Halloran is of a lower order — someone alive compared to the spirits — and thus a “ni**er”). Jack is already dead, but not till his body temperature is reduced to below freezing does he know it, and is then allowed to be an honored guest (frozen forever in time, in the picture, in the hotel) for having killed Halloran.

To repeat: not till after he walks though the closed door of the storage room does he become actually evil, as opposed to a threatening loud-mouth phony.

PS On a completely different subject

Susan Robertson (who perhaps has been shot) is a reference to Sirhan-Robert — the man “in jail for murder for ten years [1968-1978] is Sirhan Sirhan (Susanne Susanne), suggesting that Jack has been given post-hypnotic suggestions (“all work and no play,” over and over, just like Sirhan with “RFK must die,” over and over). Like Susan(ne), Sirhan was 24 at the time. Sirhan shot RFK in the kitchen of a hotel: the Ambassador — reference to Henry James, whose “The Turn of the Screw” is considered the most literary ghost story: from Wikipedia —

——————

Throughout his career James was attracted to the ghost story genre. However, he was not fond of literature’s stereotypical ghosts, the old-fashioned ‘screamers’ and ‘slashers’. Rather, he preferred to create ghosts that were eerie extensions of everyday reality—”the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy,” as he put it ….

The Turn of the Screw is no exception to this formula. …. The result has been a long-standing critical dispute about the reality of the ghosts and the sanity of the governess.

…The imagery of The Turn of the Screw is reminiscent of the gothic genre. The emphasis on old and mysterious buildings throughout the novella reinforces this motif. James also relates the amount of light present in various scenes to the strength of the supernatural or ghostly forces apparently at work.